STABLE + FreeBSD: Corrupted history file

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon May 17 06:05:57 UTC 2004


Matti Saarinen <mjs at cc.tut.fi> writes:

> I've had several problems with our new news server which is an
> Intel-based box (IBM x345) running FreeBSD. Most of the problems have
> been harware related but now innd has died couple of times with the
> following message:

> innd: SERVER can't open history /news/db/history: Numerical argument out
> of domain

As Katsuhiro mentions, try running a snapshot (after tonight or tomorrow,
whenever it picks up my latest changes) and you should get a much better
error message.  I don't know exactly what's going on, but the error
reporting should help.  dbz previously had good error messages but kept
them entirely to itself.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with FreeBSD that I know of.

> At the moment, I'm running makehistory, which in its turn is logging the
> following error messages

> makehistory: dbzstore duplicate message-id history.n:[A638FED211E8CB237C0884BC45331508]@26084562 Invalid argument

These are usually harmless and just mean that you have duplicate articles
in your spool (which doesn't surprise me a lot if you've been having
trouble with your history file).

> Could it be that FreeBSD's soft updates are the cause of this problem?
> I've enabled soft upfates on ~news/db file system.

Maybe, if you had a crash and things didn't get written back properly, but
I sort of doubt it.

> Or have I hit some memory addressing problem that is related to 32 bit
> CPUs and even smaller memory address size?

This seems possible.  Other people have run into memory allocation limits
that caused history to fail at certain sizes unrelated to maximum file
size limits.  INN does attempt to memory-map the history file.

A new snapshot should give better error messages if this is the case.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.


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